Estate of Jane Doe
N/AOUTCOME: Estate administration complete.
Jane Doe left her home in Michigan without a trace and traveled to Alaska, where she opened bank accounts using a local hotel as her mailing address and later turned up in the State of Washington with ... dementia. Over the years, with no forwarding address available, authorities, banks and others in Michigan began to turn her financial resources over to the Michigan Department of Treasury as unclaimed property. Unknown to anyone at the time, the State of Alaska did the same with the financial accounts opened there. A relative begins to receive telephone calls from various for-profit entities ("treasure hunters") with offers to obtain unknown amounts of unclaimed property for the decedent's heirs for a 20% fee. That's when I got involved. We started by opening an unsupervised estate in Michigan. Our personal representative's letters of authority allowed us to submit claims for the unclaimed property held by the Department of Treasury in this state. We were also able to claim the decedent's cremated remains from the State of Washington for proper burial. By carefully tracing the decedent's steps prior to her death, we were also able to discover and obtain the assets held as unclaimed property in the State of Alaska. Although the estate remained open for a number of years, the assets recovered on behalf of the estate exceeded the beneficiaries' expectations, and the attorney fees and court costs were less than the 20% they would have paid to the treasure hunters that had originally contacted them.
